Insane: The LA City Council just voted to hand more parks to the homeless
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The LA councilman, a loony socialist, convinced the full council to lift restrictions on homeless camping in more than a dozen parks and public spaces in Hollywood and Silver Lake areas.
Council members on Tuesday voted 10–3 to indulge the crazy, strip police of a tool to keep neighborhoods clean and invite drugs and squalor to spread through Hollywood.
The council should be shifting the homeless into treatment and accountability programs, not letting them commandeer more public spaces.
Among those hurt by the council’s inane homeless policies? Hard-working Angelenos — and the homeless themselves.
Residents, for their part, are taxed for millions of dollars in Band-Aids that enrich “nonprofits” but do little to alleviate homelessness. They also pay to scrape up the messes that encampments invariably produce.
And then there are the costs to quality of life: the parks overrun not by kids but by stupefied addicts, the sidewalks strewn with human waste, the crime and drug deals that spread near encampments.
All of scant concern, apparently, to Soto-Martínez and the merry band of lunatics (aka some 50 activist groups) that reportedly implored him to lift encampment bans in his district.
The sad thing is, an invitation to dwell in public spaces does no favors for the homeless themselves.
Homeless people, many plagued by addiction and/or mental illness, need structure and treatment — not carte blanche to entrench their own misery in drug-strewn encampments, at a high cost to those around them.
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In defense of his pro-squalor stance, Soto-Martínez offered the standard “housing first” platitudes, insisting — while voting to give the homeless free rein outdoors — that the solution was getting these folks indoors.
The city has spent billions on this very premise, only to see homelessness jump by 3.4%, per the most recent official count.
Turns out it doesn’t solve anything to stick addicts in hotel rooms, with no sobriety or treatment requirements, at taxpayer expense of about $80K per homeless person per year.
“We have spent billions on homeless housing and services, and our constituents have been incredibly generous,” said Councilwoman Traci Park, one of the three to vote no on Tuesday. “They have every right to expect something in return.”